Any seemingly pointless activity which is actually necessary to solve a problem which solves a problem which, several levels of recursion later, solves the real problem you're working on.

SGE quick and dirty how to find jobs on 'bad' slots

I occasionally have a need to find queues in Sun Grid Engine that are in one of the possibly problematic states which have an occupied slot. It is just infrequent enough that I don't remember exactly how I did it the last time.